Category Archives: Archives

May 28, 2012, 6:17 pm

Is Facebook Worth The Trouble?

Yesterday around midday I discovered that I could no longer post status updates to my Facebook page. This was no big deal, and would have represented the elimination of a major weekend time-suck, except for one thing. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening, which sets off a little alarm in my brain that Something Might Be Wrong, Something That Might Represent A Bigger Problem.

I don’t worry about being hacked. On the other hand, I never worried about identity theft until my debit card was canceled because someone managed to duplicate it at a gas pump that had been bent to this purpose in West Philadelphia: the next day I went out and bought a shredder. Similarly, before now, despite legendarily sloppy password use for many years, I have never been hacked. And yet, I thought uneasily as I fiddled with a Facebook that was behaving strangely, there’s always a first time.

…

May 9, 2012, 9:45 pm

Let’s Go To The Videotape

By Claire Potter

In case you missed this on April 14 2012 (which you did if you weren’t one of about 200 people at TEDx Connecticut College, “Rethinking Progress”) my talk just got posted to the TED site by the fabulous students who put on this event. Enjoy. And admit it: like me, you’re grading. You don’t want to read anyway.

May 1, 2012, 11:50 am

It’s Always Football Season In Florida: Computer Season? Not So Much

By Claire Potter

Every time the state of Florida expresses its contempt for education you wonder how things get worse for students in that state. But they can. Although Education Week gave the state high marks for standards, assessment and accountability, and good marks for equity, two big F’s stand out: funding and college readiness. However Education Week forgot what the F in Florida education really stands for: football.

Steven Salzburg at Forbes reported last week that the University of Florida flagship plans to save a cool $1.4 million by cutting its computer science department. (Hat tip to Comrade PhysioProffe.) As Salzburg pointed out, this is a strange way for the state to prepare students for the demands of a 21st century technology and information economy. ”The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science,” he writes, and is “cutting the…

April 26, 2012, 2:42 pm

Histories of Kennedy Love: A Book Review

By Claire Potter

JFK and JFK, Jr. in the Oval Office (AP Photo/Look Magazine, Stanley Tretick)

Christina Haag, Come to the Edge: A Memoir (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011).

Mimi Alford, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 2012).

It will be no surprise to even the uneducated reader that the Kennedy family occupies an entire cultural market niche all by itself. The Library of Congress lists over 400 John F. Kennedy items in its holdings. You can add to this number: books by and about Bobby, Ted and the other siblings; about the generations that preceded the three political brothers; about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her children (there are over 300 LOC items about John Jr. and 93 by and about the far more productive and well-educated…

April 23, 2012, 3:26 pm

OAH Roundup: Meating and Greeting in the Beer City

By Claire Potter

"Well, I got a proposal but it's still pretty durn rough."

The Organization of American Historians meeting, from whence I last posted, is at the absolutely worst time of year. I always begin the following week feeling less like a teacher than like a circus performer shot out of a cannon. So why is it that I also enjoy the OAH more than any other academic meeting? Here are some thoughts on that topic.

Location, location, location. This year’s hotspot, Milwaukee, was a mystery pick. I don’t know anyone in the East who wasn’t groaning about making this trip. Two big problems emerged during the planning phase for those of us who don’t have access to an airline hub: expensive fares and the lack of direct flights. And then — what’s in Milwaukee? Why did they pick it? No one knew. Friends would say he…

April 20, 2012, 12:19 am

Hey Babe, It’s OAH Day One: Public History Rock and Roll

By Claire Potter

Photo credit

I was sitting in the lobby of the Milwaukee Hilton and a civilian came up to me. “Hey,” he said: “Have I seen you on the History Channel?”

“Uh, probably,” I said. There are three different documentaries about crime in the 1930s that feature me as a talking head. From time to time, someone makes the connection: the working class family who lives across the street, a small child on the subway, and my all-time favorite, the men at the men’s shelter on Third Street in lower Manhattan. Because of this, I think the History Channel is one of the most popular enterprises ever created: not only do people love history, but I suspect that institutions – prisons, shelters, halfway houses – leave it on all the time because it is completely non-controversial.

“But you know …

April 19, 2012, 8:44 am

Intellectual Smack Down: Kicking A$$, Taking Names

By Claire Potter

This seems to be smackdown week among the intelligentsia. Let’s have fun with it.

First of all, there’s nothing I like better than some good snark, but I can’t understand why B.R. Myers at The Atlantic felt it was necessary to do a full tilt trashing of Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown 2011). I sometimes worry that book reviews are just an arm of the marketing department, but no fear here. Myers hates, hates, hates this book. And you know what else he hates? The middlebrow reading public, MFA programs, magazines that promote novels, authors who get large advances, authors who are well-connected, readers who are dumb enough to be led to the literary slaughter by mass media book promotions, small novels that are a big hit because they have pretended to be small novels but are actually figments of some marketing department’s imagination, and people with no authentic…

April 17, 2012, 11:16 am

When Is Competition a Positive Force?

By Claire Potter

Thomas Eakins, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Yesterday morning I was gliding down the river in my single scull. I was ten to fifteen minutes from the dock, workout complete, leg muscles burning slightly, warming down and starting to think about the rest of the day. After I navigated the last turn, a long bend that can make you or break you in the annual 3.5 mile race our rowing club hosts in October, it would be a straight shot back to the boat house.

Then I noticed another sculler on my port side: I was about a half length ahead.

I don’t wear my glasses on the water (more than one rower has sent an $800 pair of specs to the bottom of the river) so I identify others by how they row and the color of their boats. It was Jackson, a 70-something masters’ rower who…

April 13, 2012, 4:26 pm

What Kind of Times are These?

By Claire Potter

Anonymous, Adrienne Rich (c. 1975), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-103575

Today’s guest blogger, Jennifer Finney Boylan, is professor of English at Colby College. She is the author of 13 books, including Stuck in the Middle With You: Parenthood in Three Genders, which will be published by Random House/Crown in 2013, along with the revised 10th-year anniversary edition of her memoir, She’s Not There. Boylan’s blog, There from Here is at www.jenniferboylan.net, and she may be reached at jb@jenniferboylan.net.

Last week, as prelude to an evening of poetry, my colleague Peter Harris– a writer and a professor here at Colby College–gave a short reading from Adrienne Rich’s “What Kind of Times Are These.” “She burned through the fog that I lived in like an acetylene torch,” he…

April 6, 2012, 11:50 am

Is The Conservative War on Professors New?

By Claire Potter

You gotta be a pinkolezbofeminazi to get a teaching job today!

At The American Prospect, Paul Waldman asks whether an attack on higher education is going to be central to the upcoming Presidential campaign. He predicts that professors will be “the villains in the story they’re going to tell.” (4/5/2012) Following on this story at Alternet (4/4/2012), in which Sara Robinson tries to decipher the point of Rick Santorum’s swiss cheesy claim that California’s public system no longer offers courses in American history, Waldman reminds us that political attacks on higher ed have a long history. Starting with William F. Buckley’s attack on secularism in the Ivy League in God and Man at Yale (first published in 1951 and now in its 86th edition!), Waldman walks us through the post-9/11 defrocking of Ward…